


under blue suburban skies

by thatdarkhairedgirl



Category: Grease (1978)
Genre: Discussion of Abortion, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-29
Updated: 2014-01-29
Packaged: 2018-07-13 02:00:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7133999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatdarkhairedgirl/pseuds/thatdarkhairedgirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's done this before. She isn't afraid.</p>
            </blockquote>





	under blue suburban skies

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt from **watername** : "Grease - Rizzo/Kenickie - she was pregnant, but only for a time."

This is the part they don’t talk about: how when Betty Rizzo was seventeen and stupid, she listened to a boy who bought his ‘insurance policy’ for a quarter in the seventh grade, a boy who liked to bruise up her neck so bad scarves couldn’t even cover it all and whose idea of romance was waiting ten minutes into the movie before he let his hands start to wander under her skirt. How when she was seventeen, girls like her didn’t have doctors or teachers or counselors they could talk to – girls like her had mothers with dresses that matched the wallpaper and crucifixes worn heavy around their necks, mothers who threw sanitary pads into the bathroom at their first period without any explanation and looked at king-size beds like they were the coming of the Antichrist.

They don’t talk about how girls like her were sent away to ‘care for sick aunts,’ the ones who come back with fuller cheeks and emptier eyes; they don’t talk about the girls who couldn’t afford to fly to Canada or Puerto Rico, girls with ten dollars to their name who could barely manage the bus line, let alone navigate an airport, a foreign language. They don’t talk about girls in garages, in the back rooms of bars, in dirty, borrowed houses; places that used coat-hangers, knitting needles, who’d let you bleed out if you didn’t pay enough. They don’t talk about _wanting_ to be pushed down the stairs, hit by a stray car, wanting to fall into a quicksand and be swallowed up by the void.

They don’t talk about what happens after: how miracle of miracles, lateness is a virtue! They don’t talk about the late nights alone, tipsy on peach schnapps at a sorority mixer; they don’t talk about coming home on weekends, fighting and fucking and falling into the same pattern because it’s easy, because he’s there, because it feels _good_. They don’t talk about the future: how the fallout still reaches all points on the landscape, how even twenty, thirty years on the smell of engine grease and alkaloid will still set her pulse racing, that a flash of silver on the interstate can still make her heart leap into her throat. That there will always be girls like her – girls in trouble, girls without options, girls giving in to what feels like love in the backseat of a car – and there will always be those who will want to shame them for what they’ve done, for _liking_ what they’ve done.

Her husband understands what she does: “There are worse things you could do,” he likes to joke, straightening out her neon vest on the corner, pinning on the green button that says ‘volunteer.’ The protesters are loud but she is louder; Betty isn’t seventeen anymore, and she hasn’t been ‘Rizzo’ since late ’78.

She’s done this before. She isn’t afraid.

 


End file.
